Courting the big time: why netball is a match for any sport

A Guardian article that suggested netball wasn’t ‘cool’ caused a national storm last week. Its fans are passionate with good reason – this is a sport on the verge of a popular breakthrough, where the best players in the world are women

To her team-mates, England netballer Helen Housby is known as the Ice Queen. “I think it’s because my facial expression doesn’t change that much,” laughs the 22-year-old. “The way I like to play is chilled and calm.” It’s a useful attribute in a sport so fast-paced that players leap about the court as if dodging bullets.

Housby is currently living in Sydney, making her name – if not necessarily her fortune – as one of the first England players to earn a living in Australia’s new professional Suncorp Super Netball league. The UK’s first fully professional league may not be too far behind.

In the latest round of Sport England funding, announced last week, netball was awarded £16.9m for the next four years – twice as much as tennis and athletics, and £4.3m more than rugby union. That makes it the second-highest funded sport in the UK, behind cycling. It will also get an extra £3m earmarked for the England team. The figures captured people’s attention because netball is neither an Olympic nor a fully professional sport; played almost exclusively by women, it has regularly been dismissed as a playground pastime.

But this was no shock lottery win – the continued investment in netball is proof that many, including sponsors and TV broadcasters, believe it is ready to find a much larger fanbase.

Which is one of the reasons why, last week, when Morwenna Ferrier wrote on the Guardian site that netball was “uncool”, the response was as fast and furious as a wing attack scenting a charge-down. Tracey Neville, the England coach, appeared on the Today programme to talk about it; England captain Ama Agbeze took to Facebook; and hundreds of fans defended their sport on Twitter using the hashtag #netballontherise.

“It definitely generated a bit of noise from the community,” chuckles Helen Wynn, England netball’s head of programmes and partnerships – and you sense she’s not entirely unhappy about that. “The game today is athletic, dynamic, energetic – we need to change the perception from the school playground sport where you stop, start, pivot.”

If you watched England’s game against Australia on the BBC earlier this month – high scoring, with a dramatic climax and players flying at each other – you will have noticed the similarity to basketball, one of the undisputed coolest sports on the planet. But it wasn’t just the sense that the accusation was unfair that riled fans. Netball has been pushing so long for better recognition of its players and skills that Ferrier’s words felt like friendly fire in the battle for gender equality in sport.

It is a point that Ferrier, who plays the sport regularly, accepts. “It was meant to be a lighthearted piece,” she says, “and I think if there was more coverage of women’s sport, stories like this wouldn’t be jumped on as emblematic of a bigger problem.” It also doesn’t help that image issues are a well-known factor in creating obstacles for women to play sport. “Thirteen-year-old girls want to be cool, that’s a fact,” wrote Agbeze. “So what do you think printing in a national newspaper that the sport that they likely partake in is ‘uncool’ is doing to their confidence and self-worth?”

Perhaps both arguments, however, missed the most salient point, which is that netball – a sport that employs only 150 full-time staff nationwide – is at the sharp end of a revolution. An insatiable global demand for sporting entertainment, combined with the professionalisation of everything from women’s football to rugby to cricket, is about to transform the way women’s sport is viewed and played. And netball – overlooked by the International Olympic Committee and ignored by newspapers’ sports pages – has shrugged its shoulders and become a model of innovation, fashioning itself a space in a crowded marketplace, without the help of any men’s game on which to piggyback.

In terms of participation, the hugely successful Back to Netball campaign – now a regular feature at leisure facilities up and down the country – capitalised on the sport’s biggest asset. Ninety-eight per cent of women in the UK have played the game, almost certainly at school, but most drop away in their teens, never to return, because team sport isn’t traditionally where women hang out together.

“Our strategy is built on insight,” says Wynn, “and talking to women has shown us that they often feel guilty about spending time away from their families, so when they do have some time to go out, they want to socialise. We make those sessions really welcoming and accessible, and we educate our coaches so that when people walk through the door, it’s not ‘no chatting, straight on to training’, but the netball is their social time.” In the past six years, 750,000 women have taken part in the programme. “Creating winning teams isn’t as important as making sure they grow in confidence, and creating a community feel.”

That said, league numbers have grown steadily over the past decade from 60,000 to more than 100,000 and the pace of change in the elite game has been equally remarkable. Tamsin Greenway, who won 67 England caps, retired in 2015 and now coaches the Coventry-based Wasps team, which joined the expanded Vitality Superleague this season. She can still recall the awkward conversation with her parents when she decided to give up her ambition of studying at Cambridge University.

Netball is the ultimate social sport – 150,000 people can't be wrong | Tamsin Greenway

Read more

“At the time I was getting straight As and looking at doing an English degree. But I’d always wanted to play netball for England, and I remember walking into the kitchen telling them I was going to do a sports diploma instead at a university where I could play top-class netball. My dad’s face just dropped.” It was a big sacrifice for a life of financial insecurity: “There was no professional future in netball.”

In 2000, Greenway played in the grand final of Netball’s Super Cup in front of 50 people; the competition comprised just six teams. Even a few years ago, the received wisdom held that there was no audience for netball – men didn’t grow up with it, after all – and to broadcast images of the half-empty sports halls on university campuses where games were held was considered TV kryptonite.

Now, though, Sky broadcasts regular Superleague clashes and this year signed a new deal to include all of England’s home matches. Domestic games are regularly played in front of 7,000-plus crowds, in sold-out venues from the Copper Box in London’s Olympic Park to the Genting Arena in Birmingham. That England v Australia match – which Australia won by a single goal with less than two minutes on the clock – was jointly broadcast, with the BBC, to 400,000 viewers.

Barney Francis, managing director of Sky Sports, recalls being in the US, a few years ago, as the guest of a major American broadcast channel. “It was the first night of the Major League Baseball season and the Yankees were playing,” says Francis, “and in the house where we were staying there were two big TV screens, one showing the Yankees game, and the other showing the college final of the women’s netball. And all the execs were in one room, watching the netball. That was a real eye-opener for me. I remember thinking, here’s a sport that has potential.”

Francis believes that other minority sports can learn lessons from netball – in particular, the way it has partnered with the broadcaster to find a regular place in a crowded sporting schedule. The Monday Night Netball slot helped build a regular following, and not just among women. “Last year’s Superleague was actually watched by more men, who made up 54% of the audience,” says Francis.

Tamsin Greenway
(left), now a coach, seen here playing for England against New Zealand in the 2015 Netball World Cup semi-final. Photograph: Steve Christo/Corbis via Getty Images

Appealing to a male following is not, however, considered a priority – or even particularly desirable – among the netballing community. “In certain environments, mixed netball really works, in universities, for instance, or at a social level,” says Wynn. “But for lots of our participants, being a female-only sport works for them and we’re quite proud of the fact that netball can help girls and women get active really comfortably.”

If that means that inclusion as an Olympic sport is off the table, so be it. England Netball’s chief executive, Joanna Adams, has pointed out how rare it is to have a sport where women can irrefutably claim to be the best players in the world, and it also makes for a unique spectator experience – the lack of swearing and family atmosphere is common to every game, where 80% of the stands are filled with women and girls.

Perhaps the best glimpse of netball’s future in the UK lies in Australia, where Housby and her England team-mate Jo Harten faced off against each other in a riproaring opener to the new national domestic competition on Saturday. The local derby between the Greater Western Sydney Giants and NSW Swifts was played to a packed arena at the Sydney Olympic Park and broadcast primetime on free-to-air television. The advertising hoardings were crammed with big-name sponsors – Samsung, Telstra, Nissan.

Housby and her shooting partner, Sam Wallace, held their nerve against the heavily favoured Giants, matching them goal for goal before losing narrowly. Wallace, who hails from Trinidad and Tobago and played for Hertfordshire Mavericks in the Vitality Superleague last season, is an extraordinary athlete – powerfully shoulder-checking her opponents, and sending the ball through the net with an almost nonchalant flick of her wrist. Powerful, fast and deadly, she is a readymade superstar of the sport.

Housby herself has already been taken aback by autograph-hunters, as she sat in the stands at a men’s basketball game. “The professionalism out here is quite different,” she says. “The demand for netball is incredible.” Australia’s outdoor culture means the game is more visible and accessible – the facilities are such that a local town might have 50 courts – and the newspapers regularly report on the games and the teams, from player ratings to controversial selections.

Greenway says she is frustrated by the way netball is covered in the UK. “We get plenty of support at international matches, but nobody’s writing about them,” she says. It’s a fair point – when England beat Australia in a series for the first time ever last year, only one newspaper carried the story. “We’ll do magazines about our players – here’s a woman who trains full time and works in a lab! But how about we talk about the sport properly?”

Ferrier’s remarks, and the furore they caused, are, of course, great examples of this, but as she says: “We don’t play sport to be cool; we play because it’s fun, good for us, and because it’s a communal activity. Netball is fun, competitive, sometimes aggressive … it can be uncool but still worthwhile, and enjoyable.” There will be plenty of people who watch Wallace, and the Ice Queen Housby, and the tattooed Harten, who disagree with her judgment. Either way, pretty soon we may all be talking about the game.